"Everywhere you turn, arts institutions are getting wildly creative about drawing new audiences – or is that wildly desperate? Anecdotal evidence from arts administrators suggests their audiences are in serious decline. And this week the Canadian Index of Wellbeing came out with a challenging report suggesting that the decline is real and part of a larger social trend. ...

"MI PALPITA IL COR: BAROQUE PASSIONS is a compelling journey into the rich corners of the mid- and late-Baroque period. Featuring an array of thrilling instrumental and vocal compositions, the album is driven by the performances of French-Canadian soprano Dominique Labelle and American early music ensemble Musica Pacifica, founded in 1990, based in San Francisco, and whose playing has been called “a small miracle of precision and musical electricity” by the Washington Post. ...

Musicologist Ralph Locke (Emeritus, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester) will deliver a talk entitled “Alexander the Great and the Indian Rajah Puru: Exoticism in a Metastasio Libretto as Set by Hasse and by Handel”in the Peabody Institute Musicology Colloquium series this coming Tuesday, December 6 at 5PM. ...

New Comma Baroque, the Chicago-based early music ensemble, is honored to announce its residency at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in La Grange. The partnership signifies the ensemble's dedication to bringing music directly into the communities, as well as making historically informed performance accessible to audiences. ...

"Capella de Ministrers - Carles Magraner present "Hic et Nunc Live in Concert", a memorial of their 30th anniversary, a live recording of the July 15 at FeMAP by Catalunya Music with a selection of instrumental works from their last record work around Ramón Llull, an amalgamation of music that unites sounds from all the coasts of the Mediterranean. A rich and vibrant medieval repertoire, with the peculiarity of having been recorded live. ...

"When the world’s oldest song-transmission method meets the world’s most progressive song-production tools and techniques, is it bliss, or a blowout?

The women’s vocal ensemble Kitka specializes in traditional Eastern European songs, some of which predate Christianity and have been passed down by oral tradition — from mouth-to-ear-to-mouth — for centuries. ...

"A law banning software used to exploit the secondary ticketing market has moved one step closer to reality, after arts minister Matt Hancock confirmed the government would consider implementing legislation. ...

"Launched on BBC Radio 3's Early Music Show, the call for entries to the 2017 NCEM Young Composers Award is now open. Applicants must register their interest before 5pm on Friday 24 February by emailing education@ncem.co.uk, stating which age category they wish to enter.

The 2017 award is presented by the National Centre for Early Music and BBC Radio 3 in partnership with The Tallis Scholars, directed by Peter Phillips. ...

"Featuring two fascinating masses by Josquin, the Missa Di dadi and the Missa Une mousse de Biscaye, the latest The Tallis Scholars album has now been released on Gimell Records."

"Can great music be inspired by the throw of dice? The possibility clearly excited Josquin, who prefaced the tenor part in several of the movements of his Missa Di dadi with a pair of dice, each pair giving a different total score. And the scores show that he knew how gambling worked - they stop when one of the players has thrown a winning combination. Did he know this because he was living in a place where gambling was so commonplace it was even thought appropriate to refer to it in a Mass-setting? He may have been. Milan under the Sforzas in the late fifteenth century was well known to have been a hot-house of gambling, with the ducal family taking a leading role. Since there is good evidence that Josquin worked there throughout the 1480s, it seems very possible that he joined in with the fashion, at court and in private. ....

"Born in Belgium in 1822, César Franck spent his whole carreer in Paris, where he was the considered the symbol of the renewal of French music counterbalancing the crushing wagnerian influence. Organist, composer, pedagogue, he was also a major force in the rediscovery of Bach" ...

Esemble Anonymous invites you to a thematic concert "Karen Young Choir: "Lux Hodie - Celebration of Light". During the long nights of the Christmas celebrations, the notion of rebirth of light is borne, the hope of its return. It is a time to sing and to celebrate! ...

The year 2017 will mark the 250th anniversary of the death of Georg Philipp Telemann, one of the most prolific composers of the Baroque era.

Giovanni Antonini and Il Giardino Armonico have taken this opportunity to pay tribute to his eclecticism in a programme juxtaposing works that move constantly between French and Italian stylistic traditions.

On this disc, Giovanni Antonini not only directs the ensemble, but also returns to the recorder, his own instrument of choice (as it was the composer’s), and performs the Suite in A minor, the Concerto in C major and the Concerto da camera in G minor. ...

"The year ends in fine style with a programme of cantatas by J.S. Bach performed by Vox Luminis. The Belgian group directed by the bass Lionel Meunier is now acknowledged as belonging among the world’s elite vocal ensembles, especially for its interpretations of German Baroque sacred music. Its recording of works by the ancestors of J. S. Bach on Ricercar (RIC 347) won many awards. Vox Luminis now tackles Johann Sebastian himself, in a programme of cantatas composed in 1707/1708, which are thus among the composer’s earliest. ...

"At the end of the 18th century, English Longways Dances dominated the ballrooms, but from the year 1800 new dances were introduced: Francaises, big Quadrilles like Lanciers, Eugenie Quadrille and the exciting Country and Contra Dances. ...

News from Harmonia Sacra this week of it's new website portal and online reorganization. As well, reminder of its upcoming conference:

"After several years of studying the city's archives, Fabien Guilloux proposes to lead you to the discovery of a long unknown Valenciennes history: its musical history. Synthesis of his research and testimony of his recent discoveries, this cycle of conferences take you into the musical life of the city and its institutions from the 14th to the 18th centuries. An unprecedented look at heritage not to be missed! ...

" ... The man who led the facsimile project, a proudly dishevelled Englishman named Adam Lowe, was admiring the fake walls alongside me. Lowe prefers to call them “rematerialized” walls. He whispered, “Amazing—it looks just like the real thing, doesn’t it?” He is fifty-seven years old, and looks like what Paul McCartney might look like had McCartney never undergone restoration. Lowe, a former painter, who, in the nineteen-eighties, became obsessed with printmaking, runs Factum Arte, a “digital mediation” workshop that is based in Madrid. It took two years for Lowe and several dozen technicians to remake the Tutankhamun walls—considerably longer than the ancient Egyptians took to produce them. Perfecting the digital printout, he told me, had involved hundreds of hours of analog assessment: thousands of paint samples were mixed by hand, in Luxor, to match the tones in the original tomb, then compared with ink-jet outputs. ...

"Imagine the sounds coming out of a busy blacksmith shop in an alleyway in Paris sometime back in the 18th century: the hammering of wrought iron, the rhythmic whoosh of air as the blacksmith uses a bellows to stoke a fire.

We have no recordings of the actual sounds of Paris in those early days, so to try and make those 18th-century streets and alleys of Paris come to life takes a bit of careful historical research and a little imagination.

That's where French musicologist Mylène Pardoen, who's been described as an "archaeologist of sound," comes in. She's created an "interpretation" of what Paris might have sounded like way back then. ...

"Even before the publication of the first collection of Clavier-Sonaten für Kenner und Liebhaber in 1779, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach began composing works intended for a follow-up. This time he expanded the original concept, however, and included not just three sonatas, but also three rondos 'for the fortepiano'. In his treatment of the rondo-form, Bach was – as always – a mould-breaker and in the ‘Kenner und Liebhaber’ rondos the refrain melody inevitably creeps into the episodes, which in turn wander through distant tonalities. The phrase structure is frequently asymmetrical, and the borders between sections are often blurred, making this rather schematic form into something of a roller-coaster ride. Taking note of Bach's instructions regarding the choice of instrument, Miklós Spányi performs them on a tangent piano, an early form of the piano. ...

Just a reminder of the Tafelmusik Winter Institute (TWI) in January 2017. (ed.)

" ... our fifth annual Tafelmusik Winter Institute, to be held in Toronto January 5–11, 2017. We will once again welcome a select group of period players to join us for an intensive week of specialized orchestral study.

This year we will focus on the string orchestra in baroque Italy, exploring music written in Rome, Bologna, Naples, and Venice 1650-1750, by composers such as Caldara, Corelli, Cazzati, Locatelli, Torelli, Scarlatti, Durante, Leo, and Vivaldi. ...

"The complete line-up of Festival Concerts has just been announced for the June 2017 Boston Early Music Festival. You won't want to a miss a full week bursting with opera and concerts performed by some of the most engaging artists and ensembles on the world stage today! ...

"In previous posts, we have offered background and details on versions by William Byrd and Tomás Luis de Victoria. This week’s post is devoted to the beautiful setting of “O magnum mysterium” by Spanish composer, Cristóbal de Morales (c. 1500 – 1553), offering background and essential insights that lead to an historically-sensitive performance. ...

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